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Kobayashi to receive leading tech award

by Steven Schultz

Sept. 8, 2005 10:03 p.m.

Princeton professor of electrical engineering Hisashi Kobayashi
has been selected to receive the 2005 Technology Award of the Eduard
Rhein Foundation for his role in inventing techniques that allowed
dramatic increases in the storage capacity of computer hard disks.

Kobayashi,
who is Princeton's Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science, will share the award with François
Dolivo and Evangelos Eleftheriou of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory.

The
Rhein Foundation will present the award, which is one of the highest
honors in the field of information technology, at a ceremony to be held
at the Deutsch Museum in Munich, Germany, on Oct. 15.

The
award honors Kobayashi for the conception and analysis of a data
storage technique now known as PRML, which he published in 1970 and
1971. The PRML method allows more data to be stored on computer hard
disks than the conventional recording method and retrieves stored data
with fewer errors. During the following 20 years, Dolivo and colleagues
perfected Kobayashi's ideas, allowing IBM to introduce a hard disk
drive using PRML in 1990 and leading to a number of years in which
storage capacity increased by about 50 percent each year. This
technology is now widely adopted as the industry standard in personal
computers and MP3 players such as the iPod. Eleftheriou is recognized
for the invention of further improvements that have been applied to IBM
disk-drive products since 2000.

Kobayashi
received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1967 and went to work as a
research staff member at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, where he
conducted this seminal research on data storage techniques. After a
distinguished career at IBM, Kobayashi returned to Princeton in 1986 as
dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He served as
dean through 1991, when he assumed full-time teaching and research
duties in the Department of Electrical Engineering.

The
Eduard Rhein Foundation has honored outstanding achievements in
technology since 1979. Recipients of its Basic Research or Technology
Award have included the leading figures in fields of computers and
communications, such as Claude Shannon, the father of modern
information technology, and Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide
Web. Another Princeton professor, Ingrid Daubechies of mathematics,
received the 2000 Basic Research Award.